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“Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America.” This was the text message Donald Trump sent over the weekend to Jonas Gahr Støre, the Prime Minister of Norway, as part of an explanation for why Trump has upended the transatlantic relationship in his quest to take control of Greenland. This idea, of either buying the territory, which is a semi-autonomous part of Norway’s neighbor, Denmark, or seizing it by force, has almost no support in public opinion polls in America or Europe, and was hardly a matter of public discussion before Trump became obsessed with it.

On Saturday, Trump threatened to place new tariffs on eight European countries “until such time as a Deal is reached for the Complete and Total purchase of Greenland.” Now European leaders, after tiptoeing around Trump for the past year, are openly discussing retaliatory tariffs. But Europe is still reliant on American military power, especially as it tries to support Ukraine in its fight against Russia.

To better understand the largest threat to the relationship between Europe and America since their alliance emerged after the Second World War, I recently spoke by phone with Ivan Krastev, an expert on European politics and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences, in Vienna. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed how the European far right is navigating threats from its ally in the White House, what this potential break between Europe and America could mean for China’s global influence, possible off-ramps that could calm the situation, and the dangers of a normally distractible Trump becoming hyper-focussed on Greenland.

There’s been a lot of mockery of European leaders over the past weeks and months for caving to Donald Trump and for not taking the threat he poses to NATO seriously enough. But they are now in a real bind, given their reliance on America. What should they be doing that they are not?

This is a turning point in how Europe views the American Administration. Of course, when Trump came to power for the second time, many European leaders knew that the new Administration would not be particularly friendly to Europe, to put it mildly. But they basically bet on two ways to maintain Europe’s relationship with the U.S., both of which turned out to be wrong. One was Trump’s transactional politics. They thought they could make deals with him in the way they did during the first Trump Administration. And the second was that they bet the competition between the United States and China would be so demanding that no American Administration could dismiss the importance, particularly in trade and financial terms, of the European Union.

And then, suddenly, in 2025, European leaders realized three things. First, there is an ideology behind the way Trump is treating Europe. Second, in the eyes of people in the Trump Administration—even if this is not the consensus in the United States or even among the American élite—the very existence of the European Union can be perceived as an obstacle to America. And third, which is also critically important, Europeans are not going to be able to deal with Trump by pretending not to notice what he is doing. In the beginning, their calculus was, “We have a choice between being fools and pretending to be fools.” Being a fool meant pretending that what was happening was just for a while, that Trump was going to come to his senses. And pretending to be a fool meant convincing themselves that, “Yes, we are doing what Trump is pushing us for, but we are doing it for our own reasons. We are increasing military budgets not because he’s pushing for this but because this is the only way, for example, to have defense capabilities, which in the medium term is going to allow the European Union to be able to defend itself.”

O.K., but what is it you think the Europeans could be doing that they are not already doing? I still think they are in a box.

This is exactly what I’m saying. The European Union basically was fighting for time: first, to try to build [defense] capabilities. Secondly, it was fighting for time with the hope that there was going to be a change either in the politics of the American government or in the constellation of power in the United States, while also hoping that there was going to be a crisis that would convince the American Administration that the way it was treating Europe would not work going forward.

European governments are quite weak, so many of the things that Trump or Trump’s people criticize about Europe are not necessarily wrong. But where I do believe Trump slightly miscalculated was in threatening European sovereignty. It’s one thing to attack Europe for its migration policies, when you will see support from certain parts of the European right that are also angry about migration.

Then came Greenland. It’s now very difficult for even the Trumpian right in the European Union to say what he is doing is fine. We are really going to sell part of Europe because the American President wants it? To be honest, if Trump had been successful in stopping the war in Ukraine, he could have gone to European leaders and said, “Listen, I delivered, so you should trust me. Greenland is better off under our control.” But now Europeans feel that they’re being blackmailed.

Yes, I did notice in the last few days that the Trump allies Nigel Farage, the leader of Reform U.K., a right-wing populist party, and Giorgia Meloni, the right-wing Prime Minister of Italy, have released statements about Greenland that are relatively harsh on Trump.

He has chosen an issue that is not capable of pitting the conservative Trumpian right against the mainstream. Imagine you’re a member of Germany’s far-right AfD party, and Chancellor Friedrich Merz puts forward a declaration in support of Denmark’s territorial integrity and the European Union’s obligation to defend the territorial integrity of all its members. Do you imagine that the AfD would vote against such a resolution? The three countries most economically exposed to trade with the United States—Germany, Denmark, and Sweden—have already taken a very tough line.

There is also a concern that he wants Greenland before the midterm elections in the U.S. And, from this point of view, I do believe that part of the European strategy now is to show to the American public, particularly the Republican Party élites, that Europe’s reaction is not about its relations with the United States, it’s not about its relations with the Republican Party, but that the President really went too far. And that this message, which the President sent to the Norwegian Prime Minister, saying, “You didn’t give me a Nobel Prize, and this is why I’m going to take Greenland,” does not make his actions look strategic. It makes them look petty.

Trump’s arguments about the strategic necessity of acquiring Greenland are ridiculous. People around Trump, and Trump himself, have been saying for years that Russia is not really a threat and that we need to make deals with Putin. But now the White House is saying that they’re going to invade Greenland because of the strategic threat of Russia and China.

This is a very important point because of how laughable this argument is, making it very difficult for any European to defend Trump’s actions. The other thing is that, in the past year, Europeans learned that only the countries that stood up to Trump benefitted. And I’m not simply talking about China. I’m also talking about Brazil. And this is why Europeans may be forced to do things that they don’t want to do. I don’t believe that, even now, we will see the Anti-Coercion Instrument, but Europe cannot simply do nothing.

What is the Anti-Coercion Instrument?

Basically it is an instrument that was created by the European Commission to retaliate against China in the event of a trade war, and it means that, for security reasons, you can enact unified protectionist policies, across the E.U., to target a single country. And normally, as you can imagine, you don’t want to do this to the United States. President Trump is right to believe that, in many respects, Europe is weak. But, from time to time, that weakness is also the source of determination. You don’t have an option. If you are not going to show, at this moment, that you can respond, all these governments are going to look totally illegitimate in the eyes of their own publics.

So you think that Europe really won’t just totally cave?

Yeah. I don’t believe that it’s going to be the most radical response, and it should not be because, in a way, what Europe is now doing is much more about trying to renegotiate its relationship with the United States. Europe is not interested in breaking with the United States. And this is not simply because of Ukraine. Europe is now in a world that is very hostile to its political model. Secondly, Europeans are reading opinion polls, and the opinion polls show that Trump’s very hostile attitude to Europe is not widely shared by the American public. It’s a very MAGA story. Other Americans are not thinking about Europe every day, but they view us as old allies, which is preferable to the alternatives. So, from this point of view, I can imagine that Europe will, on one level, try to be as strategic as possible in showing strength and resistance. And, on another level, they will be trying to communicate to the people of the United States that it’s not about Europe’s relationship with America. We are in an abusive relationship with Trump, but we want to negotiate.

You said the countries with the closest economic relationship to America had taken a particularly firm stance against Trump. Why would that be?

It’s a message very much meant to be heard by the markets. The markets are not totally indifferent to what Europeans are going to do. Don’t forget, a significant percentage of European pension funds are still in the American market.

I think Trump thought the Europeans would fold, and he may have had good reasons to believe this, but he should be careful not to make the same mistake that the Russians made with the Ukrainians. At the time of the invasion, Ukraine was fragmented, Zelensky was not very popular, and nobody expected them to do anything. Trump tries to motivate nationalist sentiments at home, but he sometimes seems unaware of the nationalist sentiments of other countries. For example, it has been interesting to see Greenland’s reaction, because if Trump had pursued a different policy, he probably could have gotten support in Greenland, but now Greenland is looking much more pro-Danish than it has been over the last twenty years.

You said in your first answer that the Trump policy toward Europe was more “ideological” than expected. Did you mean that Trump and the people around him seem to have a particular distaste for what they see as the liberalism of Europe compared to the United States?

Many ordinary Europeans view the transatlantic relationship in almost religious terms. We stay together. We are going to do this. We have been close for such a long time.

And, by the way, I do believe this was part of the European problem. Europe developed too many dependencies on gas with Russia, on security with the United States, and on trade with China. Then, when Vice-President Vance came to the Munich Security Conference last year and basically said our natural allies are the AfD in Germany, despite knowing what that meant in the context of German history, Europeans did not know what to believe.

And then there was the national-security strategy that the Trump Administration released last year that describes civilizational decay, and civilizational failure, in Europe. So I believe it’s not about liberalism anymore. Suddenly, you have the feeling that America has basically lost hope in Europe. The Trump attitude is: We are trying to remake Europe. We are going to put our own people there. We are going to basically run the place. It’s a kind of Venezuelan moment, in which Trump and the people around him believe that Europe cannot run itself, so we are going to come and do it. Europe is not unaware of its own weaknesses, but this really became too much.

That is interesting, but it’s not exactly ideological. It’s that he sees European weakness and wants to exert power.

That is true. When Trump first came to power, there was some very interesting analysis from historians trying to gain an understanding of Trump’s world view. Something that they figured out was that, throughout his career, President Trump has held a strong belief that there was something totally wrong that, after the end of World War Two, countries like Germany and Japan were able to do so well. In his understanding, it did not make sense that the United States, the United Kingdom, and even the Soviet Union won the war, but the Germans and the Japanese were doing so well. And then it transformed into “America won, so why are Europeans living better than us? Why do they have better cars?” Etc.

And I do believe that world view stayed with him. Moreover, he does not understand what the European Union is. Europeans believe in win-win scenarios. They do believe that you really can find a way to compromise. If there is a religion of European politics, it is about compromise and consensus. And then you have somebody like Trump, who’s not interested in this.

I was talking to an American analyst, a colleague of mine, and he made an observation, which I found profound, but will probably seem trivial to you. He said President Trump had a successful business career in many respects, but he was not spectacularly successful in one business that he tried, and this was the casino business. The problem is that in the casino business, in order to win, you should try to create the illusion that others are winning.

I think that’s pretty good. I don’t find that trivial, actually.

This was looking like a Crimean moment. So trust in the United States was very much based on the fact that, regardless of our differences, Europe can rely on the Americans when it comes to Russia, and now nobody believes it anymore.

When you say a Crimean moment, I assume you’re referring to Russia taking Crimea twelve years ago, and that that was only the beginning of their designs on Ukraine, and that Trump’s desire to seize Greenland could similarly be a first step. Is that what you meant?

No. It is that in 2012 and 2013, prior to the invasion of Crimea, President Putin’s popularity had declined a bit, and there had been some protests in Russia. And then suddenly you have basically this super-majority of support that emerges after he annexes Crimea. And, in my view, President Trump also thinks that if suddenly, overnight on July 4, 2026, Greenland becomes part of the United States, then America is going to understand how great they have become. And I do believe this is really scaring many in Europe because they imagine that this is going to be a politics that others want to imitate.

I think Trump is totally wrong about how Americans would react to that, but it also just might not matter. And that in itself is scary enough. Are there off-ramps you see?

I believe there is going to be a group of countries, including those in Eastern Europe, saying, “Listen, let’s talk seriously. We are going to recognize the strategic dimension of Greenland, but what we cannot talk about is America owning it.” And here President Trump basically has an option. Either he’s going to say, “I achieved what I wanted to do. I never meant owning it. It was just about a deal, and now we are going to, for example, increase our military presence there, or it is going to be our companies that are going to develop some of the rare-earth resources of Greenland.” Something like this can happen. But my feeling is that at this moment President Trump is not interested in this. It has become too symbolic for him.

The other option for compromise is that Europeans are going to keep Greenland, and we are going to make Trump the chair of the Nobel Prize Committee so he can give the next Nobel Prize to himself. But, as of now, I do believe that Europeans probably are going to target some American goods. And we will see about the Anti-Coercion Instrument going forward.

You mentioned earlier that Europeans thought Trump really did care about building a coalition against China. But now it seems possible that one of the long-term effects of America potentially breaking with Europe in a major way would be to provide an opening for China.

Totally. This is the story. And I also believe Europeans are still hanging on to the hope that some part of the American élite—the financial élite but also the military élite—is going to go to President Trump and say, “Listen, you dislike Europe. And, of course, Europeans are idiots as you told us, but they’re idiots that we need.” If you look at global public opinion, people believe China is rising, but what is more interesting is that they have stopped fearing this. And I do believe this is something that President Trump slightly underestimated.

And then there is the question of NATO. Many Europeans have started to ask themselves the question of whether their belief in NATO has started to resemble the French belief in the famous Maginot Line. Before World War Two, the French created this “fortification” on the German-French border, which created the feeling that they were defended, and then it turned out that it was not the case. So, suddenly, this destabilization of Europe can really have far-reaching consequences. This is why some Europeans still believe that at a certain point there is going to be a strategic realization on the side of the Trump Administration that this is not a war worth fighting.

I hope you’re right, but you said Trump may have “underestimated” what effect all this would have with regard to China’s potential influence going forward. I don’t think this was underestimated or overestimated. I don’t think it goes into the equation of what he’s thinking about. The concept of a misguided national interest is one thing. Lots of Presidents have had those. The concept of a person who has no conception of the national interest is maybe closer to the mark.

No, you’re right. And do you know what the real risk for Europe is? The real risk for Europe is that Greenland will become Trump’s obsession. Because one of the important things about President Trump is that he has strong views, but he cannot keep his attention for a very long time on the same issue. And, if this basically becomes an obsession, then the nature of the change to the transatlantic relationship is going to be really, really dramatic. ♦

This is the first in a series of columns about the place of the church in modern politics.

On March 24, 1982, four men from El Salvador stood in front of the University Lutheran Chapel in Berkeley, California, and talked to an assembly of reporters about why they had entered the country illegally and about the violence—sponsored by the United States and the Reagan Administration—that they had fled. On the same day, at Southside Presbyterian Church, in Tucson, Arizona, a similar press conference was held at the prompting of an eccentric goat herder named Jim Corbett, who had been sheltering refugees for the past year and had turned to the church for help. Together, these houses of worship helped form the start of what became the Sanctuary Movement in America, a moment of interfaith civil disobedience that spread across the country. What we now know as sanctuary cities are the direct result of this interfaith organizing.

During the next few weeks, I will be writing about what has happened to the role of the church in politics and dissent. This discussion will be informed by an assumption that I’ll state plainly here: I do not believe that there can be any abiding movement for social change in this country without leadership and support from the church. As I wrote last week, part of the problem with activism today, especially on the left, is that it mostly results in large-scale flareups that quickly die out. What I’ve seen in the past decade of reporting on protests is that activist groups, whether they are purely grassroots or have been assembled by non-governmental organizations and nonprofits, do not have the proper economic, human, and organizational infrastructure to keep a movement going, especially at scale. (In fact, part of the problem with modern protest is that it mostly consists of big marches, which, while stirring, rapidly dissipate after everyone goes home and posts their photos online.) The Sanctuary Movement, in contrast, did not travel through street protest and direct confrontation but through existing, well-populated, and tightly knit faith organizations that believed in a common mission that came from on high.

It’s not hard to figure out why this isn’t happening today. Church membership has declined sharply in the past seventy years. In the nineteen-fifties, at the start of the civil-rights movement, more than seventy per cent of Americans reported attending church regularly. Today, that number is down to less than forty five per cent. Can the church lead in anything when its numbers have been in steady decline?

This question has got stuck in my craw recently. I am not a person of faith, and I am acutely aware of the shallowness and conditional nature of my convictions. This does not mean that I simply float among ideologies; still, at the age of forty-six, I do feel a pang of jealousy for people of faith who seem animated by a higher mission. There is a calm and a humility to their advocacy that I did not always see while reporting on American protests—or when I looked in the mirror.

It’s clear to me that progressive causes would be better served with the church in a leadership role, but it’s also clear that this is a nostalgic vision, out of touch with both the reality of churchgoing today and the torpor of our screen-bound lives. When so much dissent happens online or at big marches under vague political banners—when even some religious services take place within the blurry rectangles of Zoom—how does a church, synagogue, mosque, or temple make itself heard?

University Lutheran Chapel still holds services today, in the sort of odd, asymmetrical building that you sometimes find in college towns filled with architects and ideas. (The best way to describe it would be neo-California Spanish but mid-century modern, too.) In 1969, the church hired a young pastor named Gus Schultz, who had worked in the civil-rights movement in Alabama. In 1971, Schultz and U.L.C. made their first declaration of sanctuary for conscientious objectors from the Vietnam War. The logic of that declaration—that the church would provide shelter for those whose lives were at risk—was applied to the 1982 Sanctuary Movement, and Schultz is widely credited as one of the principal visionaries who spread the idea to faith organizations nationwide. U.L.C. still identifies itself as part of a network of sanctuary faith organizations, and commits itself to a broad range of social-justice issues, but it does so now at a time when young people are either not going to church or, in some instances, are seeking out more traditional and ritualistic forms of spirituality. Congregations like U.L.C. are aging, and, although there are still faith organizations around the country that engage in activist work, the church does not have the same prominence in campaigns of civil disobedience. At the same time, many progressive church leaders, facing dwindling congregations and general public apathy, have become more careful about appearing partisan in any way, which has allowed right-wing Christian nationalism to define the conversation about religion and politics.

Last September, U.L.C. brought in a new pastor, named Kwame Pitts, whom the church’s leaders believed could continue the sanctuary tradition. “One thing the search committee told me very early on was that they were planning to put themselves and their bodies on the line in this push against injustice regarding immigration,” Pitts told me. They asked her, “Are you with us?” She said she was.

Pitts believes in a church that follows in the footsteps of the civil-rights movement and thinks that the turn away from politics might be part of the reason so many young people in subsequent generations have decided to stay home on Sundays. But she also said that there has been a “fracture” along familiar political lines that has led to an uneasy stasis among clergy. Faith communities are not like universities or some workplaces, where it is easier to come together in something close to political conformity. And, because so many churches have fewer and fewer members, it’s hard for any church to turn itself into the vanguard of one cause or another. Perhaps a place of worship in a liberal haven such as Berkeley can do so, but this is harder to pull off in more politically purple parts of the country. Pitts told me that, when she attended seminary, she was taught to talk about what was happening in the country and to push her congregation to stand with the oppressed and to love their neighbor as they love their creator, which she sees as Christ’s two most important teachings. “When we got out into the real world,” she said, “we realized very quickly that there are a lot of churches who are not interested, and just want to be comforted and protect what they have to make sure their church didn’t die out.”

Pitts is of the opinion that dwindling attendance and the rise of Christian nationalism have effectively silenced much of the clergy who might otherwise have expressed political or humanitarian thoughts about ICE. She does not think that we are returning to a time when there were “over forty kids in Sunday School” per church, as she put it; nor does she see converting people into churchgoers as a central part of her mission. “Literally, my job is to ask, ‘Do you need some food? Do you want lunch? Do you need a place to vent?’ ” She said that this approach encourages the type of interfaith community-building that informed the original Sanctuary Movement.

Not every church in America follows Pitts’s philosophies, of course—and, in the fifties and sixties, not every church was willing to provide manpower, housing, and moral leadership to the civil-rights movement. The difference is that there were a lot more churches back then, which provided a ready-made infrastructure for a wide range of causes on both the left and the right. Much of the opposition to the civil-rights movement was organized through segregated churches. Cesar Chavez used religious imagery and relied, in part, on the Protestant California Migrant Ministry to help organize the United Farm Workers.

These traditions still exist, but the church’s role in modern, social-media-based activism has been relegated, like nearly everything these days, to spectacle. Within that economy of surveillance, outrage, and emotion, images of the clergy mostly exist to show the brutality of the state. Even men and women of faith can be tear-gassed, wrestled to the ground, and handcuffed by ICE agents. For the past three months, videos of clergy around the country being arrested, intimidated, and castigated by federal agents have circulated widely, and each one, it seems, adds moral urgency to the moment.

Of course, the clergy and the church can and do serve as more than sympathetic victims of state overreach. It’s just that, in the age of virality, we’re all reduced to such roles. When I reported on protests in Minneapolis nearly a decade ago, I was struck by how many clergy members I saw on the streets or during highway shutdowns, and by how many of the Black Lives Matter activists I met had organized at churches in the Twin Cities. I’m sure that many if not most of those same clergy are in the streets today. (This past week, more than a hundred members of the clergy went into Target’s corporate headquarters in the city and asked for a meeting with the company’s C.E.O. They sang the folk song “We Shall Not be Moved” in the lobby and demanded Target abide by the fourth amendment and not let in ICE officers without a judicial warrant.) But, as was true during Black Lives Matter and is true again today—as a committed, more localized reaction builds once again in Minnesota—the church is not the vanguard of the movement.

Back in 1971, when Schultz made his first declaration of sanctuary, Bennett Falk was a theological student. He has now been a member of the U.L.C. congregation for fifty-five years. I asked him whether a place like U.L.C. could ever have the impact that it did forty or fifty years ago. The general role of the church throughout society had probably been too diminished for that to happen, Falk said. Most of those who were involved in the sanctuary part of the church were old, like him. They continued their work because this was what they knew.

“Lutherans recognize two sacraments, Holy Communion and baptism,” Falk said. “And those things shape how we think of ourselves, and also how we think of other people.” It had always been important for him to live that basic idea and not let it be an abstraction, he told me. “The bottom line is that every person is a child of God and deserves that respect.”

One of the fears I have about our secularizing society is that such simple, human beliefs get taken for granted as so many of us scratch out personal edifices of moral superiority. When we are young, it’s easier, perhaps, to remind ourselves of that basic humanitarian principle because our discovery of it is still new—maybe we just met someone from a country we didn’t even know existed, or had a drink with someone from circumstances very different from our own—but, as I’ve grown into middle age, I’ve found that I should remind myself of these things more often than I do. I may be full of ideas about human dignity, but I no longer feel the firmament underneath it all. There is no clarity afforded by this unmooring outside the ability to see the same wobbliness in others, especially those who pretend to be filled with passionate intensity.

One of the more viral bits of footage to emerge in the past two weeks showed Bishop Robert Hirschfeld, of the Episcopal Church of New Hampshire, speaking at a vigil for Renee Nicole Good. After talking about others who sacrificed their lives to protect the oppressed—including Jonathan Daniels, a member of the diocese who was killed during the civil-rights movement—Hirschfeld said, “I have told the clergy of the Episcopal diocese of New Hampshire that we may be entering into that same witness. And I’ve asked them to get their affairs in order, to make sure they have their wills written, because it may be that now is no longer the time for statements, but for us with our bodies to stand between the powers of this world and the most vulnerable.” In a follow-up interview with New Hampshire Public Radio, Hirschfeld said he felt “rather uncomfortable” with all the attention he had received and that he was “not a politician.” But he also said that he believed that part of his mission was to “place yourself with your body in front of people who might react violently and with rage, and it may mean that you stand in front of someone who’s in imminent danger.” Hirschfeld also struck a decidedly nonpartisan tone, at least relative to our current degree of polarization, mentioning the murder of Charlie Kirk as another example of escalating violence in America, which, he said, had led to a “sensitivity and vulnerability” among “regular people.”

“How do I make meaning of this?” Hirschfeld asked. “And where is the source of my hope? And how do I be brave now?”

When I asked Falk if he was scared of what was happening in the country and if he worried about what might happen if ICE showed up at U.L.C.’s door, he said, “I’m very scared right now. It’s one of those things that sort of makes you consider what is my capacity for continuing to do this. But, right now, I’m not doubtful in my convictions.” ♦

It was the second night of the year, and Rosa González was watching her favorite television show, “La Ruleta de la Suerte.” Onscreen, contestants raced to solve word puzzles, spinning the wheel of fortune and following clues about Christmas carols. After a while, Rosa told her niece Griselda that she was going to bed, but she quickly came back, unable to rest without knowing the end. At eighty years old, mind games helped her stay sharp.

Rosa had spent most of her life in Catia La Mar, a small port city on Venezuela’s central coast. Her house by the water had been where family and friends gathered to celebrate baptisms and weddings. During the pandemic, Rosa’s memory had started to fade, so Griselda and her siblings had brought her to an apartment that they shared nearby. Griselda, a preschool teacher, slept in one room, her brothers Wilman and Wilfredo in another. Rosa slept on a pullout bed in a room with Jimmy, Griselda’s nineteen-year-old son. The constant company seemed to erase all traces of her dementia, Griselda told me. Rosa went everywhere with the family and insisted on helping her as she swept the floors and washed the dishes.

After the show ended, Rosa wished her niece good night. Griselda stayed up later, scrolling on her phone. “Two minutes after I finally lay down, I felt a missile coming toward us,” she told me. “I don’t know how, I just sensed it.” She rushed into the hallway and watched as the projectile, which had pierced through the bathroom wall, landed in Rosa and Jimmy’s room, erupting in flames. The blast sent Griselda flying into the living room, where she crashed amid the rubble. Ears ringing, she scanned the dark for her son and found him standing on the bed. “I could only see his red eyes,” she said. “He was covered in dust, head to toe.” Jimmy was crying for her: “Mamá, ayúdame, ayúdame.”

Griselda tried to keep him from panicking. “Mom, why did this happen to us?” Jimmy kept asking. Meanwhile, Wilman and Wilfredo were trying to help Rosa, who was lying on the floor, crushed by a washing machine. They managed to free her and hoist her onto a chair. The old woman was having trouble breathing. Still, she tried to calm Jimmy. “Don’t worry, mijo,” Griselda heard her say. “We’ll make it out of this one.”

The brothers brought Rosa to a medical clinic down the street. Meanwhile, Griselda and Jimmy sought refuge at an open lot behind the apartment building, where some neighbors were gathering. Eight of the structure’s sixteen apartments had been destroyed, their side walls blown up. “Is anyone alive?” the neighbors shouted.

Their voices reached the closet where Jesús Linares, a firefighter, was hiding with his sixteen-year-old daughter Yoliangel and his eighty-five-year-old mother, Jesucita. The explosion had shattered the windows of their apartment, one floor above Griselda’s, and covered them in shards of glass. Blood flowed from a cut above Jesús’s left eye, and his mother had small wounds throughout her body. Once Jesús recognized his neighbors were calling, he ventured into the remnants of the apartment, telling his daughter to follow. Seeing the night sky where there used to be walls, Yoliangel started screaming. “Hija, you are fortitude,” Jesús said to assure her.

As Yoliangel guided her grandmother down the stairs of the building, Jesús went to check on Tibisay Suárez, an eighty-year-old woman who lived next door. Tibisay had Alzheimer’s and no family in town, so the neighbors took turns caring for her. When Jesús entered the apartment, he found her sitting in a pool of blood. “There was a gash across her forehead, temple to temple, down to the skull,” he told me. He tore an old bedsheet to dress Tibisay’s wounds and put on her shoes, so she would not cut her feet.

Other neighbors brought Tibisay to the clinic where Rosa was being treated, while Jesús and his family fled to a relative’s house, near a Venezuelan Navy base. Sitting in the dark, they were rattled by another wave of explosions. The base, less than a mile from the apartments, appears to have been the real target of the U.S. attacks in Catia La Mar. “What we wanted, more than anything, was for the sun to rise,” Jesús said.

Griselda and Jimmy, still in the parking lot, decided to seek refuge at the clinic. They had been there for less than half an hour when doctors came out to deliver the news: Rosa was dead.

Catia La Mar is separated from Caracas by mountains more than nine thousand feet tall, but residents of the capital had a similarly long night. American aircraft bombed multiple locations around the city, including airports, military bases, and transmission towers. After the last bomb dropped, the valley fell silent. Then, at 5:21 A.M., Donald Trump announced that President Nicolás Maduro had been captured, and some neighborhoods of Caracas broke out in cheers.

Later that day, I texted a friend in the city to ask about casualties. “I’m going to be very honest with you,” she said. “No one here is talking about the dead.” There were more pressing matters, such as fixing broken windows and stocking up on nonperishables. And though the evening had been frightening and the present was uncertain, many Venezuelans felt relieved: the person most responsible for the country’s descent into misery and despotism was gone, and would finally face justice; the regime that had governed the country for twenty-seven years was beginning to crack. If there were victims, they were probably complicit, and in any case, there was always a price to pay.

Hours after the attacks, the defense minister, Vladimir Padrino López, stated that the Venezuelan government was gathering information about the victims, but whatever it found did not become public. Trump ended up being the first leader to disclose casualties, telling reporters that Maduro had been guarded by Cuban agents, many of whom had been killed by U.S. forces. By that afternoon, reports had begun to circulate that there were dozens of new patients in Caracas’s military hospitals.

The following day, Padrino López conceded that much of Maduro’s defense team had died, without offering details. A government document listing fifteen fatalities in the battalion that guarded the President was leaked to local journalists, who also reported an additional ten deaths. Among them was one civilian victim, still unnamed.

By then, reports of Cuban officers killed in Caracas had begun to circulate on the island. On social media, residents of Río Cauto mourned Fernando Báez Hidalgo, a young lieutenant whose passing was described as “a pain that multiplies itself.” Unable to limit the spread of information, the Cuban President, Miguel Díaz-Canel, announced that thirty-two members of the country’s armed forces and its Interior Ministry had died during the U.S. attack. Later that night, Venezuela’s acting President, Delcy Rodríguez, shared her condolences.

Stephen Miller, the U.S. homeland-security adviser, boasted about the Cubans’ deaths during an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper the next day. “What our Special Forces encountered when they did that daring midnight assault into Caracas were armed Cuban guards, and they sustained massive numbers of casualties,” he said. When Tapper asked about civilian deaths, Miller claimed that there had not been any: “Every single kill was an enemy kill.” A Pentagon official later told The New Yorker that the U.S. strikes had been “precisely planned to achieve operational objectives” and that civilians had not been “intentionally targeted.”

By the time Miller went on CNN, Venezuelan journalists had identified two civilian victims: Rosa González and Johana Rodríguez Sierra. Originally from a town near Cartagena, in neighboring Colombia, Johana had spent most of her life in Caracas. For decades, she had looked after a wealthy family’s estate in the mountains south of the city, where she lived with her daughter Ana Corina. Just up the hill was a group of telecommunication antennas, some of which are believed to belong to the Venezuelan military. Their caretaker, Carlos Bracho, lived in a small yellow house on site and had been there for even longer than Johana.

The towers were one of the first targets attacked by the U.S. on January 3rd. Around two in the morning, there was an explosion, followed by the sound of an antenna crashing down. Johana and Ana Corina were awakened by the blast, a cousin told the Colombian newspaper El Universal. Johana, wanting to know what had happened, decided to head for the towers, and Ana Corina followed her. As they drew close, a second bomb fell, toppling another antenna, which landed squarely on the yellow house. Carlos’s nephew, who was there that night, told the Times that he saw shell fragments hit Johana across her chest. Ana Corina was also wounded, but she managed to call the cousin. “They are killing us!” the cousin heard her cry.

Carlos helped bring the woman to the nearest clinic, someone close to all of them said. Johana, bleeding profusely, died in transit. “On the one hand, I thank God that Carlos is alive,” the person told me. “On the other, I ask God why he took Johana.”

Missiles also hit the residential neighborhood of La Boyera, down the mountain from the transmission towers. One fell in seventy-four-year-old Arturo Berti’s garden, next to the town house that he shares with his wife and sister, who are also in their seventies. A security camera captured the bomb as it exploded, setting the surrounding trees on fire and splintering the windows of neighboring apartments, including the one where Ana María Campos, fifty-one, lives with her seventy-year-old mother, Gracia.

When Ana María woke up, there was a big hole next to her bed. Everything was covered in dust, including her eyes, so she had to feel her way through the house. There were holes in the kitchen wall, the living-room floor, the ceiling of her mother’s room. Ana María called out to her dad for help, even though he had died eight years earlier. “In the darkest moment of your life, you reach for that connection with a loved one,” she explained. Nearly everyone in her family has either died or left the country, leaving her and Gracia alone in Caracas. “Little by little, we settle into this feeling of having been abandoned by life,” Ana María told me.

By January 6th, the death count had risen to fifty-eight: thirty-two Cuban agents, twenty-four Venezuelan soldiers, Rosa, and Johana. In a televised visit to western Caracas that evening, Delcy Rodríguez decreed seven days of national mourning. “The images of lifeless bodies have pierced my soul, but I know that they were martyred for the supreme values of the Republic,” she told the cameras. The armed forces held ceremonies for officers killed during the U.S. attack. Its social-media channels were flooded with videos of wooden caskets draped in the yellow, blue, and red of the Venezuelan flag, set to the opening verse of a song by Alí Primera: “Those who die for life cannot be called dead.”

“This is a regime that loves propaganda,” the Venezuelan journalist Roberto Deniz told me. “And if there is something the revolution has always taken pride in, it’s its soldiers.” Yet the identities of many of the fallen officers had been shrouded in secrecy. An Instagram post by a general from the state of Aragua appeared to be the first public notice that the Presidential guard Eduardo Peraza Moreno had perished, four days after the fact. His name couldn’t be found on any lists or headlines. The singer Claudio David Balcane, who told me that he was a childhood friend of Eduardo, said it was as if a ghost had died: “He was twenty-eight years old. He came to this world and left it, and no one found out.”

Ronna Rísquez, a journalist who has spent years exposing violent deaths in Venezuela, speculated that the government had avoided publishing a list of victims because it was reluctant “to recognize the staggering number of Cuban officers tasked with Maduro’s custody.” Rísquez is the co-founder and director of Monitor de Víctimas, an investigative platform that provides comprehensive data on violence in the country. Between 2017 and 2024, her team documented more than six thousand homicides, two-fifths of which had been committed by government forces. This month, the reporters have been focussed on exposing the human cost of the U.S. attack. By January 18th, they had verified eighty deaths, including those of the thirty-two Cubans.

The presence of Cuban military and security officers in Venezuela was an open secret. Two agreements signed in 2008, whose details were later published by Reuters, granted Cuba the power to train Venezuelan soldiers and intelligence agents and restructure much of the country’s security apparatus. Still, both governments have consistently dodged questions about an overseas deployment or flat-out denied it. In a 2019 interview, Maduro suggested that there were no Cuban military officials stationed in the country, and declared that everyone in his security ring was Venezuelan. Díaz-Canel’s announcement that Cuban agents had died in Venezuela, and his government’s subsequent publication of the men’s names and ranks, broke decades of precedent.

The two most senior men on the list, Colonel Humberto Roca and Colonel Lázaro Rodríguez, were identified in official obituaries as members of the Cuban Interior Ministry’s personal security division. Rodríguez had “organized the protection” of the island’s leaders, while Roca had held “maximum responsibility” for Fidel Castro’s safety. The majority of victims from the armed forces, however, were said to have been rank-and-file soldiers. A relative of Luis Hidalgo, who appeared on the list as a fifty-seven-year-old soldier, told the Cuban journalist Mario Pentón that Hidalgo was a civilian, and had been working as a chauffeur. “He did not go to Venezuela to defend a homeland, or to defend anything at all; he went there to help his family,” the relative said.

In Venezuela, the demise of military officers elicited little sympathy, and that of Cubans even less. “The only deaths we are saddened by are those of civilians,” one man declared on Instagram. Everyone else, another one wrote, “had been on the wrong side of history.” The reports by Monitor de Víctimas prompted many users to enumerate the victims of Maduro’s regime. Compared with the eight million Venezuelans who had fled the country, the nearly twenty thousand who had been detained for political reasons, the thousands who had been extrajudicially executed, and the hundreds who had been tortured, the deaths of a few dozen people seemed of little significance.

On January 10th, Rísquez’s team identified two more civilian victims: Lenín Ramírez Osorio and Eduardo Soto Libre, who had been previously listed as military officials, were actually air-traffic controllers. The men had been doing a shift at the Óscar Machado Zuloaga airport, an hour south of Caracas, when the U.S. bombed the area. Lenín had offered to drive Eduardo. A few minutes after his white car left the airport, it appears to have been hit by an explosive. Before dawn, several men passed the vehicle and stopped to film the wreckage. Only the chassis remained, engulfed by flames. Coming near, one of the passersby made out two elongated forms, the color of charcoal. They were Lenín and Eduardo.

When the videos were shared on social media, many Venezuelans responded with skepticism. Some doubted that the car had been bombed or that anyone had been killed. Others speculated that the passengers were connected to the government. Two sisters close to Lenín fought to set the record straight. “They worked at the airport,” one of them explained. “The driver was my friend, and now he is gone.” Despite their efforts, many brushed off the men’s passing as “collateral damage.” Eventually, the sisters stopped responding, and their father took over. “Today, Lenín’s family and friends cry for him,” he wrote. “This is not about politics. Please, respect other people’s pain.” ♦

You might be surprised to learn that someone is determining whether or not your appliances work on a day-to-day basis. That your fridge isn’t just malfunctioning because of some electrical failure. It’s because of a person, and I am that person, and your appliances are the tools with which I craft my art, and make your life a living hell.

It’s wonderful to finally meet you, or it’s terrible to meet you. Which is it? Who knows. That’s not how I operate. There is no rhyme or reason to any of my actions. This makes life exciting for you—not in the way a surprise party is exciting but in the way that makes you late for the party so that you accidentally ruin it for the person you were supposed to surprise, because your oven stopped working.

When you put your clothes in the washing machine, you do so with the expectation that they will be washed. Well, that’s your first mistake. Why do you think you deserve clean clothes? When the clothes emerge and don’t have any clumps of coagulated detergent acting as a horrifying adhesive between them, do you even thank me? No, you don’t. But please don’t take this to mean that if you started thanking me, you would get clean clothes. I’m actually not looking for anything from you when I make the washing machine work. I just do it when I want to. It’s an exercise in control, in a world in which control is hard to come by (as evidenced by the fact that you don’t control when your washing machine washes your clothes).

Now, the dishwasher is a different story. I actually do control that in a more standardized way—by making sure it doesn’t function twenty-five per cent of the time some months, and then fifty per cent of the time others. I like to reserve the latter option for months with thirty-one days. Doing this requires, mathematically, more effort from me, but it brings me joy, and with everything going on these days it’s important to do things you love. I do maintain a little flexibility with what goes wrong either one-fourth or half of the time. Perhaps the dishwasher pod is never released inside the machine. Or the dishes are still soaking wet after “drying” is complete. Maybe the knives get rusty. Maybe they get flipped blade side up. I have plans to figure out a way to transfer spaghetti sauce from a plate to a coffee mug on the upper rack. Exciting times.

Speaking of, it’s time for me to turn your gas stove off. No, no—not all the way off. Just off enough that you hear a “Tell-Tale Heart”-esque ticking from across the room, tormenting you. The flame will never ignite, so you have nothing to fear, really. Just the bomb-like ticking. Also, you can’t make soup tonight.

While my primary domain is the sudden-demise-and-resurrection cycle of your appliances, I have some extracurricular hobbies, too. That’s right—the nail that’s sticking out of your wooden floorboard—the one you keep hammering in? I’m clawing it back out, baby! The gophers that have made your back yard the Penn Station of the gopher world? Somehow, also me!

I make nothing but discordant decisions. I don’t simply throw caution to the wind, I punt it into a tornado of fire, which you’ll never know is coming because I’ve disabled the fire alarm. I live every day like it’s your last. I have one god, and her name is Chaos.

But, please, go ahead and try unplugging and replugging again. ♦

Paper and clocks are associated with first wedding anniversaries, or so the gift guides say. As the United States reaches the one-year mark in its increasingly dysfunctional and abuse-laden political marriage with Donald J. Trump, though the President has made it clear that he will take almost any sort of gift—even, and maybe especially, someone else’s Nobel Peace Prize medal. The Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado offered hers up to him last week, in a large gold-colored frame, ready for hanging. Although something of a pathetic gesture, given that the Trump Administration seems to have cut a deal with the remnants of Nicolás Maduro’s government (while Maduro himself is in a Brooklyn jail), it did earn her an upgrade. After Maduro’s arrest, Trump said that Machado was “a very nice woman, but she doesn’t have the respect”; post-medal bestowal, she was “a wonderful woman” and her gift “a wonderful gesture of mutual respect.” Those words might even get her somewhere, if only she had control over a lot of oil reserves. But clocks can make good gifts, too. After a group of Swiss businessmen arrived at the White House in November, bearing a desk clock in the form of an oversized Rolex, the country got a break on tariffs.

Those who aren’t trying to please the President might still keep clocks in mind this January 20th, because the country is in a countdown. Three hundred and sixty-five days of Trump means a thousand and ninety-six to go, including a leap year. (That’s not counting all the Trump first-term days, of course; this is a tragedy of remarriage.) We have aged so much in Trump years that the Biden Administration can feel much longer ago than it was. The brief era of Elon Musk running around the White House may now seem like a fever dream—he and Trump seem to have an off-and-on thing—but hundreds of thousands of people lost their jobs in his wake or otherwise had their lives changed irrevocably, including recipients of U.S. aid around the world. On January 1st, millions of Americans lost their health-care subsidies. Immigrants, even legal ones, live with a new level of fear. So, too, do many academics, scientists, and even lawyers. There’s an undercurrent of political violence that wasn’t present in the same way a year ago.

Crucially, there are now only two hundred and eighty-seven days until the midterm elections, which have at least the potential to significantly change the balance of power in Washington. Republicans control both houses of Congress, but the margins are slim: 218–213 in the House of Representatives, giving the G.O.P. a hold so tenuous that the Majority Whip, Tom Emmer, has reportedly indicated that he won’t excuse absences for matters other than “life or death”; the margin in the Senate is 53–47. The entire House is up for reëlection, and it is more than plausible that the Democrats will prevail there; taking the Senate, where thirty-five seats will be contested, will be much tougher, though not impossible. Even before November, there will be special elections for four vacant House seats, including the one held, until recently, by the Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene. Her spinning away from the Trump majority—spurred by, of all things, the Jeffery Epstein case—may be an indication that this Administration is decaying more quickly than the calendar alone would indicate.

For at least some other Republicans, at this one-year juncture, the breaking point may be Trump’s uncannily serious talk of buying or seizing Greenland, a territory of our NATO ally Denmark. Some MAGA types love the idea, but, as Politico reported, the Senate Majority Leader, John Thune, said last week that there was “certainly not an appetite for some of the options that have been talked about or considered.” That statement came before Trump’s announcement, this past Saturday, that he will be imposing tariffs on Denmark and seven other European countries “until such time as a Deal is reached for the Complete and Total purchase of Greenland.” Senator Thom Tillis, Republican of North Carolina, has raised the possibility of invoking the War Powers Act, a tool that Congress has for reining in the President. Not incidentally, Tillis has said that he will not seek reëlection this year. His seat is open, and one of the top targets for Democrats, who have a strong candidate in former Governor Roy Cooper.

North Carolina matters a great deal, because fewer than a dozen Senate seats are in contention at all, and only a handful are close calls; the others are in states that are solidly red or blue. One is in Minnesota, where Senator Tina Smith, a Democrat, has decided not to run again. That race, in that state, is a reminder that, though calendars are crucial, any calculation can be upset in the seconds it takes, for example, for an ICE agent to open fire into an S.U.V. The situation in Minneapolis is precarious, with Trump threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act and put troops on the streets. “If I needed it, I’d use it,” he told reporters on Friday, on his way to Mar-a-Lago. “It’s very powerful.” His Justice Department is reportedly investigating Mayor Jacob Frey and Governor Tim Walz for impeding immigration enforcement, both of whom have described the move as an attempt to intimidate them. (This past year has certainly been very different for Walz, who was Kamala Harris’s running mate, than it would have been.)

Depending on what Trump does next, Minneapolis may become the scene not only of passing chaos but of a breakdown in the relationship between Americans and their government. Precisely because of those stakes, it is worrisome that two of the leading Democratic contenders for Smith’s seat—Representative Angie Craig, who has a reputation as a centrist, and Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan, who is more aligned with the Party’s progressive wing—have been quarrelling, in personal terms, about whose response to the ICE actions and to a social-service-fraud scandal involving the Somali community is better. The intraparty divisions that the two women represent are profound and will play out in primary races at every level. One question is which kind of Democrat has the best chance in November. The answer may differ state to state; one of the more endangered Democratic seats is that of Senator Jon Ossoff, in Georgia.

A judicial clock is running down alongside the electoral one. Trump has issued two hundred and twenty-eight executive orders—eight more than in his entire first term and sixty-six more than Joe Biden did in his four years—along with other dubious actions and pronouncements. These orders have been met by a stream of lawsuits—hundreds of them, by the A.P.’s count—which should keep coming. (Paper is a traditional first-anniversary gift, after all.) The A.P. even brought its own case, Associated Press v. Budowich, after it was barred from the White House press room for refusing to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. It’s hard, with Trump, to separate the absurd from the catastrophic. Between now and July, the Supreme Court will hear arguments or issue rulings on a number of the most significant cases occasioned by Trump’s actions, including his attempt to do away with birthright citizenship. On Wednesday, the day after Trump’s Inaugural anniversary, the Court will hear arguments in a case over his attempt to fire a member of the Federal Reserve’s board of governors; Jerome Powell, the chair of the Fed, recently released a video statement saying that he was being criminally investigated in retaliation for not setting interest rates where the President wanted them.

When Trump was inaugurated, there were fears that he might get three or even four more chances to name a Justice to the Supreme Court. It’s a small blessing that, with a year down, he hasn’t had any yet. Still, one Justice, Clarence Thomas, may be counting days for his own reasons. Thomas is currently the fifth-longest-serving Justice ever, having taken his seat on October 23, 1991. By mid-May, he will have moved up three spots, to be the second-longest-serving. Will that be enough for him to decide to retire while Trump can still appoint his successor? (It would take until April, 2028, for him to pass William O. Douglas for the No. 1 spot. Trump, depending on the makeup of the Senate, may have fewer options to get a nominee confirmed by then.) And Thomas, who is seventy-seven years old, is one of four septuagenarians on the Court. The others are Samuel Alito, seventy-five; Sonia Sotomayor, seventy-one; and John Roberts, seventy.

There are other countdowns. On February 3rd, about three hundred and fifty thousand Haitians are due to lose their Temporary Protected Status, though some may be able to find a different route to stay in the U.S. legally. The Administration has also cancelled, or is trying to cancel, T.P.S. for hundreds of thousands of people from other countries, including Venezuela, Somalia, Nepal, and Nicaragua. There is ongoing litigation, but people with T.P.S., which is meant for migrants from countries in crisis, and a related immigration status, called humanitarian parole, are especially vulnerable, because both Biden and his predecessors relied on the discretion of the executive branch to extend them that relief in the first place. Trump is, in effect, attempting to make use of the same discretion, in reverse, but without regard to the fact that many of these migrants are well settled in their communities, with jobs, neighbors, and children who are citizens, or to the conditions in their home countries. One question is whether he’s done so in an illegitimately arbitrary way, but a majority of the Justices may back him up; they have already stayed certain lower-court attempts to put some of these cancellations on hold. Cruelty, sadly, is not necessarily unconstitutional, at least not in the eyes of the Court.

Indeed, if we’ve learned anything about our constitutional structure in the past year, it’s that the Presidency has, over time, been given too much power. The abdication of the other branches, particularly Congress, to the executive, on matters ranging from military action and surveillance to the economy and immigration, did not begin with Trump. The corollary is that, while Trump can break many things—he can seize a foreign leader, he can scuttle alliances, he can derail lives, and he can make Americans even angrier at one another—whoever comes next will have a lot of power to undo his damage and rebuild. Even he doesn’t have enough control over his party or the courts to keep the next elections from happening, even if having a fair election in every district will require vigilance. (It always does, to some degree.) By that same measure, a President J. D. Vance or Marco Rubio could make the hole we are in much deeper. The Democrats have only so much time to figure out who their own standard-bearer will be. That said, the Party should not move so quickly as to foreclose a truly contested primary, which would have been valuable in 2024.

But that election will be in 2028, and here we are, still in 2026, still with Trump—and still with time to mobilize for the midterms. What Congress has given to Presidents it can also begin to take away. It will take years and a galvanized counter-majority to truly restore the balance, but even just winning one of the chambers back would provide a significant brake on the MAGA vision of executive power. And people at every level, from parents without legal status to the governors of states, can keep bringing the Administration into court. 2026 will be the year for pushing back against Trump with a ballot in one hand and a lawsuit in the other. There is no going back to how things were before January 20, 2025, but there may yet be a better way forward. ♦